Right now if you’re working on a symbol and want to create an instance of the symbol that’s right in front of you you need to manually go pick it from the Insert menus or manually search for it (and we all know Search can be very sluggish)
Would love to have just a “Create Instance” menu item when you right-click a symbol, or a button in the inspector panel. Would save us a ton of time.
@samvermette
This option was suggested already years ago. It was also suggested to provide a keyboard shortcut and the ability to create an instance by dragging a symbol while holding special keys.
Cmd-Shift-D (Create Instance)
Cmd-Shift + Drag symbol to create an Instance
Unfortunately Sketch team ignored these suggestion.
For me the quickest way to handle this was the combo of Automate Plugin and Sketch Runner. Automate has a option for “Insert Instance of Selected Symbol”, which you could easily run using the command bar from Runner.
Clearly using two different plugins to do this one thing is not ideal, but it’s worth trying out if you haven’t. I haven’t checked out Sketch’s new native command bar ⌘K to see if it works as well as Runner, but if it does that’d be good.
It’s a shame, it seems like such a simple thing to implement that would save us so much time 
Correct. It would save a lot of time.
I have to spend 5-10 clicks to create an instance when the symbol is right in front of me. It would be so much easier if we could reuse symbol duplication concepts when creating instances.
Examples:
Thanks for sharing! It’s an interesting idea and we’ll keep it in mind.
We haven’t heard anyone from the Sketch chime in on this. Any thoughts @jonne?
A new team member coming from Figma asked me today how to do this. They had a Symbol in front of them and wanted to create an instance, they asked me “How do I create an instance of this symbol in Sketch?”. When I told them they had to manually search for it or go find it from the Insert menu, they thought I was kidding 
Hey @samvermette Thanks for the reminder. I see that I’ve responded to a similar topic (I’ll merge them after this).
It’s a good idea, and it’s on our minds. I’ll keep you posted when we know more.